A confederate chaplain: A.G. Haygood

Military Images, May/Jun 2003

Atticus Green Haygood was born November 19, 1839, in Watkinsville, Georgia. Married with a baby boy, Paul, in 1861, war found Haygood as a Methodist minister in Sparta, Georgia. Although his wife was against his leaving, he accepted a chaplain's commission in April in the 15th Georgia Infantry.

The first days were busy ones, spent nursing the sick and writing letters for illiterate soldiers, as well as holding regular services. In early September he was placed in charge of a hundred seriously ill Georgia soldiers sent to hospitals in Richmond. That city he found to be "a very fine, wealthy, aristocratic and wicked place." He also wrote to fellow Methodists in Atlanta that "our regiment has not forgotten the Christian teaching...."

When he returned to Camp Walker in Georgia he found low morale in the regiment. Many officers and men felt the regiment would never see combat, but instead stagnate in the war's back-waters. Half a dozen officers resigned before Christmas, but Haygood beat them to the punch, resigning November 13, in time to visit home before going to Atlanta for the Methodist Conference meeting.

His bishop appointed the new civilian senior preacher in the Watkinsville circuit, with two assistants to help him cover the two county area with 21 country and crossroads chapels.

When the army went into winter quarters, Haygood joined his fellow ministers in holding a huge revival. Hundreds of soldiers were converted from December 1863 through May 1864.

Haygood was appointed minister to the Methodist Church in Rome, Georgia, continuing to serve as missionary chaplain to nearby soldiers as well. Despite Confederate setbacks, he continued to preach against fatalism about an inevitable defeat, an attitude he attributed primarily to Presbyterianism and "Hardshell" soldiers.

Awarding his efforts, Haywood was named an elder, a "travelling preacher" in the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in November 1863. He remained in the area until February 1864 when he went to take a post as chaplain of Bryan's Brigade, then stationed in eastern Tennessee. One of only eight Methodist chaplains in the Army of Tennessee, he joined with "three Baptist co-laborers, and a visiting Presbyterian" in holding a morning communion service when he arrived. But ill health would make him return home in a short time, arriving at the family home in Atlanta that summer, where he received an interim appointment to Trinity Church.

Haygood was there when Atlanta fell, and he escaped to his Watkinsville farm. He returned to Atanta in December 1864, to resume the position of pastor of Trinity Church, which had been spared burning. His involvement with the Confederate cause was now at an end. Bitter at the end of the Confederacy, he began to preach with "a power of invective ... never equalled."